Constitutionalists forgotten in drama

12:00AM GMT 16 Jan 2001

SIR - David Trimble's reasonable critique of Rebel Heart (report, Jan 15) rightly ignores Ronan Bennett's erroneous allegations of a witch-hunt against him in favour of debating the drama, the fully rounded history and its current political implications.

Final judgment should wait until all four episodes have been screened, but provisional judgments about the drama's central defects can be made and are very similar to those displayed by Neil Jordan's 1996 film Michael Collins, about which we issued a historical health warning. Although historical dramas, especially those made for Hollywood, are not academic work or documentaries, they probably do much to sustain erroneous historical interpretations.

In both these dramas, the central problem is that they largely ignored the existence and role of constitutional nationalists and Unionists - the Trimbles and Mallons of their time. The conflict is portrayed, with far too few qualifications, as between two violent minorities: the invariably brave and humanised republicans and the usually cowardly and dehumanised British and/or Protestants.

Such bad or inadequate history helps sustain the murderous activities of those whom the Irish writer Eoghan Harris describes as the Recurring IRAs - the Ernie Coynes of our day, who carried out the Omagh bombing and who hope to repeat their brutal acts of fascism, regardless of the wishes of the majority in the island of Ireland.